“See, my dad taught me tonight is about respecting the dead because this is the one night that the dead and all sorts of other things roam free – and pay us a visit. All these traditions, jack-o’-lanterns, putting on costumes, handing out treats, they were started to protect us, but nowadays… No one really cares.”
In the 2006 film adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, undercover narcotics officer “Fred” describes the emotional and mental effects of the deleterious Substance D:
“D… Substance D. “D” is dumbness, and despair, desertion-desertion of you from your friends, your friends from you, everyone from everyone. Isolation and loneliness… and hating and suspecting each other, “D” is finally death.”
Trick ‘r Treat thinks of Halloween the same way. Over the course of the movie’s four interwoven stories about one bloody Halloween night, friends will desert each other, neighbors and partiers will hide their true selves from each other under masks, and a lot of people will end up dead. This isn’t quite a slasher, but there’s still a lesson here on how to survive, and that’s to respect traditions, no matter how absurd they seem. Just because you don’t understand the rules doesn’t mean they aren’t there for a reason.
One of the few meta-minded horror movies that isn’t about the genre, Trick ‘r Treat focuses on Halloween itself, putting an ironic but affectionate spin on October 31st and giving Halloween the same holiday treatment that other sprawling hyperlink movies like Valentine’s Day, New Year’s Eve, and Love Actually have for more cheerful, rom-com-friendly festivities. Sometimes we forget that Halloween has an aesthetic all its own that has nothing to do with horror in other media: orange, black, and neon green, grinning jack-o’-lanterns, girls dressed like princesses (or sexy versions of things that are not normally considered sexy), ghosts made of sheets with eyeholes cut out of them, cartoon witches, and that chant which echoes from knocked door to ringing bell across every neighborhood, where kids ask for candy under threat of wickedness. Traditions persist beyond memories of their making, sustaining themselves by word of mouth, on rumor’s breath, passed from parent to child, friend to friend, uniting us in activities culturally sanctioned for one night that would never be allowed otherwise. On October 31st, we can pretend to be something we’re not, make selfish demands of our neighbors, deceive and scare one another, let loose our Dionysian sides. Sure, we do those things on other days. But only on Halloween is it allowed, or even celebrated.
That’s what Trick ‘r Treat is, really: a celebration. The tone is creepy, but all in good fun; the violence is gory, but amusingly over the top; the visuals are lovingly, just slightly too perfect to be real. Each of its four major narratives is about someone facing bloody consequences for their sins, against Halloween traditions or otherwise, but trust me, it’s all severed-tongue-firmly-in-cheek.
Like any hyperlink movie (Magnolia, Short Cuts, even Pulp Fiction), the connections between stories are half the fun, and what’s interesting about Trick ‘r Treat is often the way that the film’s shuffled chronology shows us stories from first one perspective, than another. It makes sense, then, to start with the most emblematic sequence of all of them, which comes in near the middle, interacting with several major stories but working as a short on its own.
On a night when monsters, human and otherwise, roam free, one of the most chilling ideas is how dangerous the Halloween atmosphere can really be. The festivities in the streets of Warren Valley, Ohio, resemble a miniature Mardi Gras or Rio Carnival, as music plays, people drink and dance, displaying painted faces and elaborate costumes. When a man kissing a woman in an alley near the party goes too far, biting her wrists and neck until she bleeds, we may think that this is actually a vampire, taking advantage of the one night of the year when he can openly hurt people and wear a cape without being called monstrously unfashionable. But supernatural or not, the results are all too real: stumbling down the street, the woman’s screams go unheard underneath the raucousness and music, and when she dies, the monster is able to pose her slumped, bloody corpse against a wall like just another spooky decoration and walk away scot free. It’s one of a handful of moments in the film that is truly horrifying, not just enjoyable macabre.
It’s also a moment that reverberates throughout the rest of this narrative, which turns out to be about the brutal battle of the sexes that Halloween inspires. Booze and anonymity turn those interested in hooking up into animalistic predators on the hunt. This story, starring Anna Paquin as a virgin whose friends try to help find her a date for the night, has one of the film’s more obvious twists, but the journey is still fun, and has a little something to say about who, exactly, is hunting whom.
Halloween costumes are aspirational; as a reporter in the film says, Halloween is “the one night a year where we can pretend to be the scariest thing we think of.” That doesn’t just mean scaring others, it can also mean having the courage to be something we ourselves are scared of being. A lot of women, normally admonished against both sexual availability and sexual aggression, are encouraged on Halloween to let their slut flag fly. Paquin’s friends, for instance, begin their story buying Disney Princess costumes which show off plenty of cleavage, and talk about past years, when they’ve picked up “fresh meat” dressed as sexy nurses or sexy sailors. Paquin, in contrast, is a virgin, nervous about her first time, and chooses a conservative Little Red Riding Hood outfit. The fairy tale associations continue as she makes her way alone through the woods to meet up with her friends and finds a wolf along the way: the man who killed a woman with his vampire’s fangs. “What big eyes you have,” he tells her. But of course it turns out that the man’s fangs are fake, and that Paquin and her friends are the real monsters. First they rip off their costumes, then they rip off their clothes, then they rip off their skin–the true costumes–to reveal the werewolves underneath. The “vampire” thought he could prey on women. Now he’s their prey instead. As a fable, it’s pretty routine: the transgressor is transgressed upon. What makes it neat are the details (clues dropped unnoticed in earlier dialogue, as when one of Paquin’s friends points out that she didn’t mind accidentally inviting a woman last year, as it all tastes the same to her), and the way the story demonstrates how female sexuality can be just as rapacious as a man’s. At least on Halloween night.
One of the interesting dichotomies of Halloween that Trick ‘r Treat explores is that it’s a very different holiday for adults and children. The adult holiday is about drinking and dressing up and sex, about releasing your wild side. But for kids, letting loose is about imagination–engaging yours and enflaming others’ through stories and scares. In its other more traditional narrative, Trick ‘r Treat shows what happens when that impulse goes too far, when kids really set out to be cruel. On a night of traditions, there’s nothing so dangerous as disrespect, toward others or the dead themselves.
The other theme of the story, in which a quartet of young trick or treaters plan and execute an elaborate prank on a mentally challenged girl, only to have the tables turned, is the way people are hardly ever what they seem. Dressed in an angel costume, Macy seems sweet and respectful when she’s asking Principal Wilkins for one of his jack-o’-lanterns. “It’s a scavenger hunt,” she says. “For UNICEF?” But Macy is obviously the one who planned the cruel trick they play on Rhonda (who Macy calls an “idiot savant”). In fact, none of them match their costumes. Chip, the pirate, isn’t brave; Sara, the alien, seems to go along because she wants to fit in (those braces! that poor girl); and death-masked Schrader, in the most intimidating costume, turns out to be the kindest of the group, the one who smiles earnestly at Rhonda and comforts her after it becomes clear to him that they went too far.
And then there’s Rhonda, whose witch costume appears to be in contrast with her reputation as an “idiot savant.” She actually seems more like a high-functioning autistic than anything, judging by her specific type of social awkwardness and a scene where she recites the history of Halloween like she’s reading Wikipedia. Rhonda is a nice, straightforward kid; witches are supposed to be clever and manipulative. But it’s Rhonda who gets manipulated, tricked by Macy’s scary story about a bus full of “special” kids being crashed deliberately in a scheme cooked up between the kids’ parents (“they were willing to do anything to ease their burdens,” says Macy) and the bus driver, who chains the kids to their seats before the bus is driven off a cliff into the water at the bottom of a rock quarry. And it’s Rhonda who gets scared by Macy’s prank, with the other kids pretending to be the waterlogged, murdered bus passengers. But when, of course, the real dead kids turn up, Rhonda is protected by her jack-o’-lantern, one she carved herself, knowing that a lit lantern wards off evil spirits at night. So she’s something of a clever witch after all, and the moment when she leaves the pranksters to their doom is pretty satisfying. It’s an old story: sin turned against the sinner. Poetic justice. That’s what happens when you disrespect people just because they’re different. Especially when the people you’re disrespecting are the restless dead, on this of all nights.
That split between the adult Halloween and the children’s Halloween, noted most comedically when Macy and her friends go trick or treating at a house where a sex party is happening, is explored in a darker vein in the rest of the stories, which all involve three neighbors. Principal Wilkins (a nebbishly menacing Dylan Baker) lives next door to a cantankerous old coot named Kreeg (Brian Cox, kind of wasted here in a role that doesn’t give him enough dialogue to sink his teeth into), and both live across the street from a couple, Emma (Leslie Bibb) and Henry (Tahmoh Penikett, from Dollhouse). All three neighboring houses are visited by Trick ‘r Treat‘s signature boogeyman, Sam, who embodies both sides of the Halloween spirit. An apparent naif in a creepy little kid costume (orange onesie, sack mask tied around his neck with rope), Sam is also a pumpkin-headed monster who kills those who don’t play by the rules of the holiday. Even his choice of weapon–a lollipop with a bite out of it, which becomes a slashing implement–marries the lighter and darker aspects of Halloween in one unsettling package. His actions in these remaining stories show where Trick ‘r Treat‘s moral center truly lies.
Although all three stories have different structures, the point of each is clear: discard tradition at your peril. That’s especially true for the couple, whose scenes mostly bookend the movie. Emma and Henry get home after a night of partying–we see them later in the film, earlier in the timeline, ignoring the girl who got bitten in the alley–and Henry is up for more fun (which I guess for him is putting on a VHS porno for them to watch together), while Emma wants to take down the decorations immediately. She blows out the candle in their jack-o’-lantern, leaving her vulnerable to the predations of demonic little Sam, who stalks her as she pulls the sheets off the fake ghosts and takes down the fake severed limbs from the trees in their yard. After dozing off upstairs, Henry goes looking for her and finds Emma’s body parts filling in for the decorations, a nice, macabre touch. The lesson about allowing yourself to enjoy Halloween properly sets the stage for the rest of the movie.
Across the street, in the next tale, you’d think Principal Wilkins would qualify as the villain here and would get his comeuppance. After all, the man turns out to be a serial killer, who murders a child and buries him in the yard. But Trick ‘r Treat takes a page from Hitchcock’s Psycho by twisting the narrative into the black comedy question of whether or not Wilkins can get away with his crime. Various obstacles present themselves in quick succession as Wilkins tries to bury the body. He’s interrupted by busybody neighbor Mr. Kreeg, by Kreeg’s barking dog (whom Wilkins tries to placate by offering his victim’s severed finger as a treat), by Wilkins’ own kid pestering him to come inside and help him do the carving, and finally by Macy and her friends, who surprise a blood-spattered Wilkins by trick or treating at his door. By this point we’re interested to see Wilkins get away with it, and it’s Halloween that helps him do it, especially when the kids simply interpret Wilkins’ bloody shirt as a costume choice. The delightful twist, where Wilkins’ adorable little moppet of a son turns out to want his dad’s help carving up the dead kid’s head, not some jack-o’-lantern (“Don’t forget to help me with the eyes,” says the son), actually feels like a happy ending. Not just because the film forces us to identify with Wilkins’ problems, but because his victim is the only one in this story who isn’t respecting Halloween traditions. The mean little kid goes around smashing pumpkins and stealing candy, prompting Wilkins to give him some poison chocolate–but not before the principal delivers a lecture on how tradition keeps us safe from evil spirits. He’s right, too: Sam visits Wilkins’ front door, holds out his bag, and gets a piece of candy, before leaving in peace.
Treats, not tricks. That’s how it’s supposed to go. And that’s what Mr. Kreeg learns, in the film’s final and most violent story. After Kreeg scares some trick or treaters away (through his dog, which he’s dressed up as some kind of devil hound), he takes their candy–a reversal of the proper Halloween order, and one that Sam cannot abide. The little monster enters Kreeg’s house and stalks him upstairs and down in what becomes an extended, bloody fight, with Sam cutting and stabbing Kreeg and self-avowed NRA member Kreeg fighting back with shotgun blasts. (One reveals that under the sack mask, Sam is no psycho child, but a pumpkin-headed demon.) What saves him? Inadvertently giving Sam a piece of a candy, thereby fulfilling the trick or treat bargain and restoring holiday order. (Kreeg isn’t exactly home free; it turns out he was the bus driver, long ago, and tonight those special kids have come back to pay him a visit.)
Where does Sam go, after visiting Wilkins and Kreeg? He heads across the street, to Emily and Henry’s house, just like any other trick or treater; thus closing the film’s narrative loop. Whether you’re gathering candy, playing pranks, violently enforcing Halloween traditions, or just making a spooky anthology movie, it always pays to be methodical.
Trick ‘r Treat is no masterpiece. As an anthology film, none of its tales really hold a candle to some of the other classics of the genre, from Kwaidan to V/H/S. They’re broadly predictable, not terribly scary, not all that creative. What makes the movie enjoyable is its atmosphere, structure, and tone. The often sumptuous lighting and quality costuming (particularly Sam’s instantly iconic design) allow the film to represent all sides of the holiday, from cheesy fun to convincing gore. The decision to discard the traditional anthology film structure, in which a frame story introduces a series of shorts and then concludes, in favor of Trick ‘r Treat‘s hyperlink style, Pulp Fiction-esque interweaving, is a smart one that makes spotting the connections a fun game on its own. And the half-kidding, half-serious, all affectionate tone the movie takes ensures its success as exactly what it intended to be–a beloved holiday classic, the kind of thing you watch with friends on Halloween night when you’re not up for something really scary. The world needs good little movies like this, films of modest ambition but quality execution. Maybe the nicest thing about it is that Trick ‘r Treat doesn’t make you choose between tricks and treats. Here, you get plenty of both.
Every year, Kyu attempts to watch and review 31 horror movies in 31 days. This year, it’s Killtoberfest 666, because Halloween is for everyone, whether you’re 6 or 66. Check out past Killtoberfests along with this year’s reviews, and be sure to follow us on Twitter @insidethekraken to track Kyu’s progress.